Pierluigi Paganini April 06, 2013

The day is near, the group of hackers belonging to the collective of Anonymous declared in a unanimous way, war on the state of Israel, promising a sensational action on April 7th.

The popular group of hacktivists started in the last months a campaign dubbed #OpIsrael  to  protest against Israeli bombing of Palestinian territory, the hackers have often expressed full solidarity with the Palestinian people condemning Israeli Government and its decisions. The operation was proposed for the first time by the hacker that uses the pseudonym “Anon Ghost” according to the Arabian Gazette on Wednesday, the first cyber-attacks were launched during Israeli’s Pillar of Defense assault on Gaza in November 2012.

One of the hackers representatives motivated to The Hackers Post website its participation with following statement:

“Israel isn’t stopping human rights violations. It’s to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state.” “the hacking teams have decided to unite against Israel as one entity…Israel should be getting prepared to be erased from the internet.”

During the last week in internet circulated also the news that members of Anonymous have provided support to the Palestinian people to evade on-line surveillance by Israeli intelligence.

Anonymous has promised to ‘erase Israel from the internet’ in a coordinated attack against the country on April 7th, the Holocaust Memorial Day that occur on 27 Nisan (April/May) to remember the event happened during the summer of 1942 when about 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka.

On Twitter Anonymous declared:

“To the government of Israel: You have NOT stopped your endless human right violations. You have NOT stopped illegal settlements. You have NOT respected the ceasefire. You have shown that you do NOT respect international law,” the group of hackers also published a video on YouTube video renewing accusations against Israeli government that  menaced to shut down the internet in Gaza.  “When the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all internet and other telecommunications in and outside of Gaza, they crossed a line in the sand,”.

The hacktivists are promoting a massive call to army inviting all the members of collective and followers to hit the Israeli network infrastructures, of course the menace is creating considerable apprehension among the Israeli authorities.

It would appear that the majority of the main hacktivist cells has already confirmed the adhesion, most of them in the past have been guilty of attacks on government organizations and offices, Israel Government is very concerned and is organizing its defense to mitigate the offensive.

Director of online webpage Accessible Government, Ben Avi,  reported to Haaretz website:

“what distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces.”

In the last wave of attacks around 700 Israeli websites have been successfully targeted including high-profile government systems such as Israeli President’s official website and the Foreign Ministry, official of Israel government are conscious that they are under attack, the Israeli Finance Ministry declared around 44 million unique attacks on government websites. Principal websites of the country suffered DDoS attacks and hacker also obtained personal data related to Israeli officials.

While Anonymous warns Israel not to shut down the internet in Gaza the Deputy Information Security Officer Ofir Cohen confirmed with an e-mail sent to Knesset ISP employees that government websites are expected to face distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and attempts at vandalism.

“The estimations are that [the cyber-attacks] will reach an unusual level that we have never seen before,”

The Information Security Department of the Knesset is working to put in place all necessary measure to mitigate the attacks and protect information stored on principal government networks.

Nir Kapelushnik, ISOC’s CEO suggested:

“shore up passwords, get rid of simple ones (like “abc123”) and choose complicated ones (at least 8 random letters/digits, mix capitals and small letters, no names or obvious terms, etc.); renew/update anti-virus software; upgrade and update to the latest versions of browsers; and stay away from suspicious links, attachments, documents, etc. “The upcoming hacking attack is liable to disrupt our day-to-day activities,” “We do a lot on the Internet today, including sending and receiving mail, shopping, searching for information, and interacting with social networks. The measures we are recommending will hopefully keep the damage to individual Israelis to a minimum.”

I believe that the message is very meaningful in a cybersecurity context, the battlefield is not only represented by companies’ networks and government network assets, every machine exposed on the internet is a possible target and its impairment could advantage further attacks, a large scale campaign needs also the participation of a huge quantity of compromised machines.

We just have to wait …. In the meantime various intelligence sources sustain that the attacks against Israel could be supported by state-sponsored attackers. AnalysisInetelligence web site reported:

“We recently reported on the revival of Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) being coordinated by a group of hackers aligned with Anonymous. The excellent information security blog Voice of Grey Hat subsequently detailed some of the known or suspected locations of participating entities: ”The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome.: ”

“The attributions are to the best of our knowledge, based on language analysis, history and helps from our sources who speak Arabic ( various forms ) and Farsi ( various forms, mostly Persian ) natively:

AnonGhost ( distributed – freelance )AnonymousPal ( U.S and E.U – freelance )

OsamaTheGod ( false flag )

Teamr00t ( Pakistan – ideological )

Hannibal ( Anti-OPISRAEL , inside fight , Indian – freelance )

PunkBoyinSF ( Egyptian ties – freelance )

Mauritania HaCker Team ( distributed – freelance )

ajax Team ( unknown )

MLA – Muslim Liberation Army ( ties to Pakistan )

Gaza Hacker Team ( Palestinians in U.S and E.U , perhaps some members in Arab countries as well )

Gaza Security Team ( same )

Gaza Security Team ( ties to Syria – Syrian nationals – freelance )

Algerian Hacker ( unknown )

Iranian Cyber Army ( Iran , hired hackers based in Iran )

Remember Emad ( Joint Lebanese and Iranian effort – high likely state-backed )

Parastoo ( Iranian , reported to have ties with IRGC-QF and Hezbollah )

Syrian Electronic Army ( reported to be controlled by elements of pro-Hezbollah activists )

Our analysis to the moment shows not much of coordination between these groups contrary to the popular belief and the sum of human resources all together to the best of our current analysis is not more than 50 individuals. The collectives with Arab leanings are not much advanced, have ties with residents of European and U.S and they are mostly relay on Dumps and Botnets. The teams with Pakistani, Syrians and Lebanese members are more advanced and reported to have ties with governments. Iranian teams are just using the situation to harm Israel and U.S interests and reported to be directly funded by IRGC and MOIS, the Iranian Intelligence.”

Is it possible that someone is manipulating events?  Who and how?

What would happen if a state-sponsored actor exploited the attack?

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Anonymous)